The Guns of August

In August of 1914 the world erupted into the conflagration that came to be known as the Great War. After the European powers repeated the steps less than thirty years later, the Great War was amended to World War I. It is a conflict about which I know very little. Its brutality and pointlessness do not make way for glory in the same way as its better known child. There is little glory at the bottom of a trench, nothing rousing in a pile of young bodies rotting in no man's land. 

Attempting to rectify my ignorance of the conflict I spent the past month or so reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, her account of the first month of the war. Superlatives fail. It was a fascinating read. Even though the Europe it conjures is scarcely a century past (there are people in your town who were alive during the conflict), it is an entirely foreign world--a world of princes and kings and archdukes and detente and entente and confusing treaties and the vast progeny of Queen Victoria. It was an era that still believed in honor, that took a nation's right to dominate whatever was within its power to control as a piece of natural law, that saw Europe as a continent of competing powers and not some panEuropean utopia. 

Tuchman begins with a vision of old Europe. The death of King Edward VII of England was attended by nine kings, five heirs apparent, forty imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens, and numerous ambassadors. The Kaiser of Germany, William II, rode in attendance; the new King of England, George V, rode in the front row; King Frederick of Denmark was there, as was Alfonso of Spain and Manuel of Portugal and the soon to be famous Albert of Belgium. Franz Ferdinand was there, accompanied by the old Emperor Franz Josef. Crown Prince Rupprecht, who would lead the German army in battle, was there. Edward had broken England's isolation, uniting the nation with France and Russia, two old enemies and the upstart Japan. 

The unity with France unsettled the Kaiser and prevented him from pursuing a better peace with England. The Kaiser longed for the acclaim of France, dreamed of being paraded through the streets of Paris. Tuchman notes, "it is perhaps the saddest story of the fate of kings that the Kaiser lived to be eighty-two and died without seeing Paris." The rapprochement was not to come. The new Germany, united by Bismarck, emboldened by the victories over France in 1870, chomped at the bit, straining to assert itself in a continent that openly derided its parochialism and provinciality. Germany would soon get its chance. 

England's unity with Russia was even more of a blow to the German people. Alexandra, Czar Nicholas's wife, was German. Nicholas and William were cousins. But Alexandra hated William and the czar was constrained by his more evenhanded ministers from signing an entente with Germany. Germany was, for all intents and purposes, surrounded. France to the west, Russia to the east, England on the seas. Their alliance with Italy was suspect and Austria could not provide enough protection against the hulking beast of Russia to give Germany freedom to fight only on one front in the west. A two-front war haunted Germany's military minds.

However, much of this was subliminal at the death of Edward. Peace seemed to be the order of the day. Germany could pontificate and quotes its Nietzsche and thump its chest, but the balance in Europe seemed to be stable. In 1910, the year of Edward's magisterial funeral, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, which "proved that war had become vain." Given the economic interdependence of the nations, no country would be foolish enough to start a new war. A cult grew around the book and optimism seemed to replace predilections of war.

But at the end of June, Gavrilo Princip's shot rang out in the Sarajevo morning and the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire choked to death on his own blood in the back of his motorcar. Austria declared war on Bosnia, Bosnia was defended under treaty by Russia, Germany came in for Austria under odd pretenses. Thus the war in the east began. Inventing a threat from France, Germany violated Belgian neutrality in order to invade France from the north. Treaty-bound to defend Belgium, England declared for the side of the Allies and dispatched an expeditionary force to France. Thus the war in the west began. 

Four years later, after 16 million people had died, the madness was put to bed for a time. 

In my next post I will take a brief look at how that first month played out and how it served as a harbinger for the horrors to come. I would love to have more time to engage with the book, but tomorrow morning I start teaching and will be pretty busy for the next several months. My posting has fallen off the map since moving to Colorado, but I anticipate being able to post once per week during the school year. I should have a follow-up post by the end of next weekend.